Distribution design in object oriented databases : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Information Science in Information Systems

Abstract

The advanced development of object oriented database systems has attracted much research. However, very few of them contribute to the distribution design of object oriented databases. The main tasks of distribution design are fragmenting the database schema and allocating the fragments to different sites of a network. The aim of fragmentation and allocation is to improve the performance and increase the availability of a database system. Even though much research has been done on distributed databases, the research almost always refers to the relational data model (RDM). Very few efforts provide distribution design techniques for distributed object oriented databases. The aim of this work is to generalise distribution design techniques from relational databases for object oriented databases. First, the characteristics of distributed databases in general and the techniques used for fragmentation and allocation for the RDM are reviewed. Then, fragmentation operations for a rather generic object oriented data model (OODM) are developed. As with the RDM, these operations include horizontal and vertical fragmentation. A third operation named splitting is also introduced for OODM. Finally, normal predicates are introduced for OODM. A heuristic procedure for horizontal fragmenting of OODBs is also presented. The adaption of horizontal fragmentation techniques for relational databases to object oriented databases is the main result of this work.